My first NaNoWriMo mistake...

So I'm writing frantically and have been all week. Really. Lots of chocolate Halloween candy fueling the frenzy. (I blogged about that a few days ago, LOL.)

After getting up early and whipping off several more pages AND a blog post, I took a break and went to check out the cool NaNoWriMo website. It's got some cool stuff and encouraging words, and places to customize my own page.

I tried to fill out my "Novel Update" page without uploading any of my actual pages, but when I navigated back to the page my info was gone. So I decided I must NEED to enter the actual novel pages for the NaNoWriMo word-bot to count the words (why take my word for it, right? I could be lying, or misinforming everyone.)

I was pretty proud of my word count this morning, too. I was up to about 7,000 words.

I tried to copy and paste my pages into the word counter. Nothing happened. I tried it again. Nothing happened. I tried a third time, and still nothing. Finally I decided that I must have simply forgotten to hit "send" the first time, and that the page uploading wasn't necessary.

I hit send.

The word counting robot decided I must have written 21,000 words, since i entered my text three times. Argh! Do I look like a cheater now or what? Try as I might, I can't figure out how to undo the word count. If anyone knows how, let me know so I can start over.

In the meantime, I'm still writing furiously and frenetically, trying to catch up with what the word-bot thinks I've already written. I managed to bang out another few thousand words today, even with the regular procrastination and magazine editing and mom-stuff I had to do (my middle child had a classmate over this afternoon to gather materials to make a Mesopotamian brick... really... and my daughter had her first voice lesson with a new teacher...)

As of a few moments ago, I'm up to 11,700 words. A good fifth of the way to my goal. But still 10,000 words short of what the word-bot thinks I'm up to.

Have you heard the phrase "Be the person your dog already thinks you are" ?

I'm trying to be the writer the word-bot already thinks I am.